*I'm somewhere in the polychrome neighborhood of the
Tucson Visitor's Center. They seem to specialize in
selling patches of desert to elderly passers-by in RVs.
If you wanted a stellar example of demographic
transition in the West, it would be here.
*In the meantime, on the other side of the planet,
Lee Kuan Yew, the wily old right-wing autocrat,
scolds Nehru and his feeble socialist legacy while
talking to a softball crowd of Indian industrialists.
Although Lee is Nehru's contemporary, Nehru's
dead and he isn't, so maybe a few triumphalist
summaries are in order.
http://www.ciionline.org/Common/313/default.asp?Page=Minister%20Mentor%20Lee%20Kuan%20Yew.htm
A long speech nicely calculated to irritate the hell out of leftists
The part I like best is when Lee deftly suggests that
the visionary Nehru was too dreamy and lazy to
go walk the beat and see if his Gandhian share-the-wealth
schemes were actually being implemented.
Maybe if Nehru had been mayor of Singapore while
Lee had to deal with a vast polyglot "License Raj'
swarming with fanatics... oh well.
The positive thing about the passage of time
is that the facts on the ground outweigh the
reality-distortion schemes of the period. And the
clock doesn't stop ticking. I heard a joke when I
was in Singapore this year:
"If China gets the hardware and India gets the software,
where does that leave Singapore?"
"Nowhere."
*But you know, I'm not buying it. I'm not worried
about Singapore. Not a bit of it. You know why?
Because I'm sitting in the desert on my way
from Los Angeles to Belgrade and the most interesting
thing I have to offer today is a speech by a Singaporean
about New Delhi. By the end of the day I'll be hundreds
of kilometers away.
*Folks, this is the first truly global century. All bets
are off.
